The First Ad in The General

In 1970, a U.S. Army specialist stationed at Fort Shafter, Hawaii, placed an ad in Avalon Hill’s The General magazine offering to moderate a game called Nuclear Destruction by mail. He was twenty-three years old. His name was Rick Loomis. He had no company, no computer, and no idea he was founding an industry.

Within months he had over two hundred players. The mail was overwhelming. Fellow soldier Steve MacGregor wrote a computer program to handle the moderation, and they rented time on a Control Data mainframe near the base. After leaving the Army in 1972, Loomis bought a Raytheon 704 minicomputer for $14,000—approximately 4K of memory, teletype input, and tape-based storage. Games were saved as rolls of paper tape hung from nails on a wall. Loomis claimed to be the first person to buy a computer solely to play games on it.

He called the company Flying Buffalo Inc. For approximately five years, it was the only significant play-by-mail game company in the world. By 1987, there were hundreds.

Rick Loomis did not design the most famous game in any category. He designed the categories.

Three Firsts

Loomis’s design career produced three genuine firsts, each creating a new format that others then filled.

Computer-moderated play-by-mail gaming (1970). Before Loomis, Diplomacy had been played by mail since 1963 through fanzines with human moderators. Loomis introduced third-party computer moderation—hidden movement adjudicated by machine, turn results individualized for each player, multiplayer strategy at a scale postal mail couldn’t otherwise support. The Museum of Play described his PBM system as “in some sense, the first online game, though one still mediated by pen and paper post.” No documented predecessor exists. Chris Harvey, founder of ICBM Games in the UK, started his company directly after playing Flying Buffalo’s Nuclear Destruction—Loomis personally suggested he run the game in Britain.

The solitaire RPG adventure (1976). Buffalo Castle was the first published solo adventure for any role-playing game. It predated Choose Your Own Adventure by three years and Fighting Fantasy by six. Using Ken St. Andre’s Tunnels & Trolls rules, it solved a fundamental access problem: not everyone could assemble a gaming group. A single player could now have an RPG experience alone. Steve Jackson’s Death Test (1978) was a direct successor in the RPG solitaire tradition. No direct citation from CYOA or Fighting Fantasy creators acknowledging Buffalo Castle as inspiration has been found, so the causal chain to the broader gamebook explosion is uncertain—but the chronological priority is undisputed.

System-agnostic RPG supplements (1981). Grimtooth’s Traps and the CityBook series pioneered supplements designed to be usable with any RPG system. Rather than providing statistics for a specific game, these products presented content in system-neutral terms that any game master could adapt. No earlier commercially published system-agnostic RPG supplement line has been identified. The concept is now ubiquitous—DriveThruRPG has an entire category. Grimtooth’s Traps was listed in the D&D 5th Edition Dungeon Master’s Guide Appendix D: “Dungeon Master Inspiration.” The series sold over 250,000 copies and was licensed by Goodman Games for ongoing reprints through 2024.

These are format innovations more than mechanical innovations. Loomis didn’t invent a new dice system or resolution mechanic. He invented new ways to play—at distance, alone, across systems. Each opened design space that other designers filled. The categories he created outlived the specific games that created them.

Starweb: The Masterwork

If Loomis’s format innovations built the plumbing, Starweb proves he could also design the fixtures.

Launched in 1976, Starweb is a 15-player, 255-world space strategy game played by mail with computer moderation. Its defining innovation is asymmetric victory conditions: six character types—Empire Builder, Apostle, Pirate, Merchant, Berserker, and Artifact Collector—each scoring points through fundamentally different actions. An Apostle earns points by converting worlds peacefully. A Berserker earns points by destroying them. A Merchant accumulates wealth while a Pirate raids it. The result is emergent diplomatic tension—natural alliances and natural conflicts arising from incompatible goals, played out across months of postal turns.

The game has been in continuous operation for nearly fifty years. Over 1,000 games were completed by 1990. Scott Haring called it “beautifully balanced, with a design so well-polished it gleams.” Carol Mulholland called it “one of the best turn-based games ever.” It won the Charles S. Roberts Award for Best PBM Game (1984), was the first PBM game ever listed in Games Magazine’s “Games 100” (1981), and won Origins Awards for Best PBM Game across three decades (1985, 1997, 2000, 2003, 2006/2007). The Strong Museum of Play holds a copy in its archives.

Variants evolved over decades—Regular, Slow, Email, Partners, Anonymous, Multi—demonstrating an architecture extensible enough to accommodate new play formats without breaking. Fred Saberhagen, who licensed the Berserker name to Loomis, was so taken with the game that he wrote the novel Octagon (1981) using a fictionalized Starweb as its narrative backdrop.

Starweb is still playable by postal mail and email as of 2025, operated by Loomis’s sisters Nancy and Laura.

The Publisher Who Also Designed

The honest record requires acknowledging that Loomis was primarily a publisher and industry builder, not a prolific designer. Flying Buffalo’s most famous titles were designed by other people: Tunnels & Trolls by Ken St. Andre, Nuclear War by Doug Malewicki, Ace of Aces and Lost Worlds by Alfred Leonardi, Mercenaries, Spies & Private Eyes by Michael Stackpole.

Loomis’s personal design catalog numbers roughly fifteen games across forty-nine years. Nuclear Destruction (1970), Battle Plan (1972), Starweb (1976), Buffalo Castle (1976), Heroic Fantasy (1984), and the Nuclear War expansions—Nuclear Escalation (1983), Nuclear Proliferation (1992), Weapons of Mass Destruction (2004). The Berserker board game (c. 1983) was co-designed with Fred Saberhagen. He conceived the Grimtooth’s Traps concept and contributed individual traps, but the series was an anthology edited by Paul Ryan O’Connor and illustrated by S.S. Crompton.

The Nuclear War expansion attribution carries a genuine discrepancy: biographical sources unanimously credit Loomis as designer of all expansions, but BoardGameGeek credits Doug Malewicki and Michael Stackpole for Nuclear Escalation. The most likely explanation is that Malewicki retains original-system credit, Loomis designed the expansion content, and Stackpole contributed in a development role.

The volume is modest. The impact per game is disproportionately high.

The Talent Incubator

Flying Buffalo functioned as a proving ground for designers who went on to shape the industry. Michael Stackpole—Origins Hall of Fame 1993—worked under Loomis before writing landmark BattleTech and Star Wars novels. Elizabeth T. Danforth—Origins Hall of Fame 1995—became one of the most respected RPG artists and designers in the field. Larry DiTillio edited CityBook I for Loomis, then wrote Masks of Nyarlathotep for Call of Cthulhu—widely considered one of the greatest RPG adventures ever published—and later wrote for Babylon 5 and He-Man. Ken St. Andre—Origins Hall of Fame 2018—had his Tunnels & Trolls published and supported by Loomis for decades.

Steve Crompton’s tribute captured the pattern: “He had the ability to inspire and nurture talented people to be more talented than they thought they could be.”

When Loomis’s own production department rejected a solo adventure he’d written, he accepted it with good grace. Later, when an outside designer complained about a rejection, Loomis told him: “Well, they’ve rejected things I’ve written, too. I trust my people.”

The methodology doesn’t score mentorship. But four Hall of Fame designers passing through one small company in Scottsdale, Arizona, is not an accident. It’s a design environment.

GAMA and the Industry He Built

Loomis co-founded the Association of Game Manufacturers—later the Game Manufacturers Association (GAMA)—and was elected its first President and Treasurer on August 19, 1978. He served as President on multiple subsequent occasions, described variously as “numerous times” and “whenever they needed him.” He remained an Emeritus Director until his death. GAMA’s official memorial stated: “Without him, it is doubtful if GAMA would even exist.”

He was reportedly one of only six people who attended every Origins Game Fair since its founding in 1975. When TSR dissolved in 1997, Flying Buffalo became the world’s oldest RPG publisher still operating under its founder. Loomis ran it until the day he died.

Steve Jackson’s assessment stands as the definitive summary: “Gaming would not be the phenomenon that it is today without the tireless, patient work of Rick Loomis.”

That statement is about infrastructure, not game mechanics. And it may be the highest compliment any designer has ever received.

The Honest Assessment

The methodology scores design. Rick Loomis’s most consequential contributions—the PBM industry, GAMA, Flying Buffalo as talent incubator, the convention circuit he helped build—live in dimensions the four pillars don’t fully measure. His design output is modest in volume but disproportionately consequential. The score reflects what he designed. The eulogies reflect what he built. Both things are true.

Invention holds at 7. Three genuine firsts—computer-moderated PBM, the solo RPG adventure, system-agnostic supplements—each created new categories that others filled. But these are format and delivery innovations more than mechanical game design innovations. The PBM industry he founded is now largely replaced by online gaming. The solo adventure format became a massive genre, but direct causal influence on CYOA and Fighting Fantasy is undocumented. The innovations were noticed, adopted as formats, but the specific mechanical vocabulary stayed within his ecosystem.

Architecture holds at 7. Starweb’s fifty-year operational lifespan and awards across three decades prove exceptional structural durability. The asymmetric design creates emergent diplomatic narratives that reward social play. Variants evolved over decades without breaking the core architecture. But the specific game mechanics weren’t copied by other designers. The formats propagated. The architectures stayed home. Built to last—fifty years proves it. Built for itself.

Mastery holds at 6. Forty-nine years in gaming, full-time from 1972. But roughly fifteen designed games across that span. Most of Flying Buffalo’s catalog was by other designers. Loomis’s primary role was publisher, industry leader, and talent incubator—not prolific designer. Starweb is a genuine masterwork. Buffalo Castle created a genre. The Nuclear War expansions sustained a franchise for four decades. The quality is real. The volume relative to career length is modest.

The Hidden Pattern

Rick Loomis solved access problems.

Every major innovation in his career addressed the same question: how do you let people play who otherwise can’t? Can’t find opponents in the same city? Computer-moderated play-by-mail. Can’t assemble a gaming group? The solo RPG adventure. Locked into one game system? System-agnostic supplements. Can’t afford a referee? The computer handles it.

This is infrastructure work. It’s the kind of contribution that becomes invisible precisely because it succeeds—once the door is open, nobody remembers who built the door. They remember the people who walked through it.

Michael Stackpole captured it: “He created computerized Play-by-Mail gaming, which is arguably the creative well from which all computer MMOs have flowed.” The Museum of Play archived his work. Steve Jackson credited him with making gaming possible at scale. Scott Thorne offered a character assessment equally rare in any industry: “During the decades he spent in the Industry, I never heard him speak a bad word about anyone and never heard anyone say anything negative about him.”

Loomis died on August 23, 2019—one day before his seventy-third birthday—from lymphatic cancer. About 160 people had gathered for Gary Gygax in 2008. The gaming industry gathered for Rick Loomis too, in its own quieter way. GAMA created the Rick Loomis Service Award in October 2019. The plumbing he built still carries water.

What Remains

A PBM game still running after fifty years, operated by his sisters from the system he built. A solo adventure format that became a genre. A system-agnostic publishing concept that became an industry standard. A trade association he co-founded that still governs the business of gaming. A company that was the world’s oldest RPG publisher under original management. Four Hall of Fame designers who passed through his small office in Scottsdale. A card game franchise that satirized nuclear war for four decades. And Grimtooth’s Traps, listed in the Dungeon Master’s Guide, still teaching game masters that the door might be the trap.

The methodology scores design. By that measure, Rick Loomis is an established professional with a modest but disproportionately consequential body of work—three format innovations that each created new categories, and one masterwork in Starweb that has outlasted nearly everything else in the hobby.

But the methodology doesn’t score what it takes to build an industry from a roll of paper tape and a Raytheon minicomputer. To create the institutions that let other designers thrive. To run a company for forty-nine years without anyone ever hearing a bad word about you.

He built the plumbing that let the water flow. The water remembers, even if it doesn’t always know his name.

The games he designed still run. The formats he invented still work. The door he opened never closed.

Total: 27 points. Year: 1970.

Total: 27 points. Year: 1970.

The games he designed still run. The formats he invented still work. The door he opened never closed.